Planning a Redesign

So, I’m redesigning this blog, again, and I’m looking around at the way blogs tend to shape up today. There tends to be two main trends in blog design:

Minimal
Most commonly, a monochromatic colour scheme, and lots of whitespace

Fucking Busy

Lots of sidebars, lots of pretty pictures (particularly in the header) full of ads, “friends” lists, archives in your sidebar, redundant “recent posts” lists, et al

I don’t particularly want to partake in either of these trends, so I’ve been looking around, collecting images, and doing a few sketches. Basically where I’m at is something mildly monochromatic, but with splashes of colour thrown in there for interest, no sidebar, and little in the way of useless, trivial information.

I’m probably going to toss the whole “About” or “Colophon” page. Actually, I’ll probably do away with all the pages except for a dedicated archive page (to which I will pay a lot more attention than the one I currently have). I don’t really have a need for “sections, or pages or any of that stuff — I have a separate site for most of that anyway.

I’d like to reinstate comments, but keep that as simple as possible.

All this has led me to also want the most lightweight, and fast-as-fuck blogging engine. WordPress isn’t bad, but its got a whole lot going on that I just don’t need. That said, I do publish from MarsEdit these days, and I don’t have to face the interface except to approve comments (that would be a handy feature to have), so maybe I could get by with WordPress.

It’s all kind of up in the air at the moment. It’ll come together at some point. Meanwhile, I’ll post random entries every now and then, and see how it goes.